Hard Drive Space

[SBGTF]

I'm running Windows XP Home SP1, and my 120GB WD EIDE hard drive is showing up in Explorer as 111GB. What happened to the other 9GBs I paid for?

 

[PremiumG]

the elves got them

it has to do w/ marketing 120 gigs as ~ 120,000 megs but really 1024 or so megs is a gigabyte.

 

[PremiumG]

and some of the space is used for file allocation and stuff

 

[ViRGE]

PremiumG is right, it has to deal with how computers and drive makers define a gigabyte differently. Read the AT FAQ, and there should be an entry on this.

 

[DGath]

DVDs are the same. They advertise as 4.7, but you can really only put like 4.4 on them.

 

[Sid59]

the missing hard drive room is sacrificed to the hard drive Gods.

 

[CraigRT]

completely normal.

 

[Trey22]

Originally posted by: SBGTF


I'm running Windows XP Home SP1, and my 120GB WD EIDE hard drive is showing up in Explorer as 111GB. What happened to the other 9GBs I paid for?

Complementary hidden pron.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

simply.....hard drive manufactures do this

1000mb = 1 gig. therefore 120gig drive = 120,000mb

in windows...as its digital an therefor runs binary code it can only count like this...2,4,8,16,32,.....512,1024
so to windows 1gig = 1024mb

u still have the same amount of space, jus windows gig is bigger an obviously a bigger number goes into the same number less times

 

[Steve]

Rule of thumb: hard drives are about 7% less than what they're labeled as. Thus 80GB = 74.5, 100 = 93, 120 = 111, 160 = 149, etc....

The reason, as everybody's been saying, is that hard drive makers advertise their products' capacity in decimal - for example, the generic disclaimer on the box: "<maker> rates a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes."

But computers count in binary (powers of two). Thus, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30).

So, 120,000,000,000 bytes divided by 1,073,741,824 bytes per gigabyte = 111.76GB

YMMV - this number may be more or less than what you end up with for things like boot record(s), file and directory and partition tables, general housekeeping stuff.